Up up, down down, left right, left right, b, a.

"Ever since my childhood, I've been scared, I've been afraid
Of being trapped by circumstance and staying in one place.
So I always keep a small bag full of clothes carefully stored,
Somewhere secret, somewhere safe, and somewhere close to the door." - Frank Turner, "The Road"

"But you should never be embarrassed by
Your trouble with livin'.
'Cause it's the ones with the sorest throats, Laura,
Who have done the most singin'," - Bright Eyes


Video games harm children. I know this from experience; from the harm they did me. This isn't the Bill O'Reilly/Joe Lieberman culture war. I don't care about the violence some contain, or their slothful distraction from exercise, homework, or other aspects of life. They never harmed me in any of those ways. Where I went wrong was that I had very little video game integrity. Sonic gets killed unexpectedly on an easy level, my Steelers give up a deep touchdown in the first quarter of Madden, and I lunged for the reset button. A thumb flick and my angst became a black screen, a loading page that diluted my embarrassment. And with that, none of it ever happened. That frustration. That dejection. Evaporated.

Around New Year's I saw a ton of status updates of people who couldn't wait for 2010 to end. What the fuck were they doing wrong? Yeah, I had some rough patches, some 2 a.m. confidings with friends I'd like to forget, but even with those, 2009 and 2010 were far and away the most exciting years of my life. And 2011? I was starting work NBC (one of my 2 dream companies to work for), had a group of my closest friends committed to joining me in Spain for San Fermin, a lot of other promising situations on the horizon. I had zero complaints of any kind. Had every reason to feel that my lucky number 11 would be my year, even greater than the two it succeeded.

I'm not really sure what happened.

I don't remember the initial pebble that the snowball grew around before it started hurtling downhill. I definitely know it gathered serious momentum on and after Super Bowl Sunday (seriously, what was that, Steelers?) and in the less than 60 days to speak of in 2011, I could think of 4, maybe 5 good experiences overall. Aside from that handful, of all the Charlie Browns in the world, I was the Charlie Browniest. A victim of the sophomore slump. The winter of my discontent. And as urgently as I grasped for one, there was no reset button to speak of. My Pavlovian expectation courtesy of Sega, Nintendo, and Sony had failed me. Maybe for the first time I felt trapped by my life, rather than stretching greedily in the freedom of it. Correspondence grew one-sided as I let emails and texts accumulate without response. I felt years removed from the person who wrote the posts below this one, from the backpacker drenched in Naples, penitent in Hiroshima, invigorated in Warsaw. Even from the one of last October, defiant in Havana.

I reached out to one friend. Even that was unintentional. I was just trying to catch up; to allay her fear that my M.I.A. status had anything to do with her, or anyone else really. I didn't mean to delve in to my problems in detail. But the moment our voices connected, they joined hands and leapt. Instantly. Surgingly. Maybe not surprisingly to those who know both of us, but she and I were on parallel trajectories. (We think the same things at the same time. We just can't do anything about it.) Alone, that is. Conversation as commiseration, briefly. But then conversation as construction. The comfort not in someone else suffering with me, but whom that person was. Realizing that whatever negative energy out there was strong enough to bring someone like her down too wasn't something you defeat at its height. It's something you ride out until you see the hint of an opening. Then spring at that. My answer didn't come by looking in the mirror, but by listening to it.

That hint of an opening was two days off from work in a row in my now erratic schedule. A Tuesday and Wednesday with nothing to do. Where some people would see midweek errands or catching up on sleep, I saw a window that lead both forwards and backwards. An opportunity to go somewhere I'd never been and to remind myself of a life, and an identity, that had escaped me for too long. Without hesitation, without much planning, I shipped up to Boston.

It wasn't so much what I did, or what I took in of the city that was quintessentially Boston. No stories of Sawwx Fans at Fenway, dispatches from Mike's Pastries, or anecdotes bred over beers with townies in Southie. I enjoyed the sights I'd never seen before, but it was the ones I already had that stuck with me. I'd never been to Boston until 2 days ago. But there were parts of it I'd experienced before. Standing in Fenway after dark, there's a building by the Prudential tower, in the highrise cluster between Back Bay and South End, that echoes the Atomic Bomb Dome. The high winds last night chilled like those two night strolls on Memorial island in Hiroshima when I couldn't bring myself to leave it. A darkened stylized room in the Museum of Fine Arts displaying Buddhist statues, sparingly and accurately decorated, meant to evoke a temple. For me it was instantly one on the grounds of the Ten-Ryu in Kyoto. I chewed different malts, crushed hops in my hands at the Samuel Adams Brewery, and if I kept my eyes closed it could have been the Heineken tour in Amsterdam. The lone head of a deva statue at MFA; I had seen hundreds of its surviving brothers that lined the bridges approaching Angkor Thom. I thought of my barely 20 tuk-tuk driver who drove me around Angkor, his even younger wife who worked at my hostel. Remembered how the eyes of the Asura demons from those bridges were identical to the orange eyes of some of the elephants walking past me, and how I felt connected to the millenia-long-dead craftsman who shared that thought.

I got to see some of Boston. But I got to experience more of myself, walk around places I didn't think I'd be again, immerse vividly and authentically into a moment, to toggle sleeping memories back to the present once again.

Life has no reset button. Yeah, that's impossible. But there are cheat codes out there for when you need them. I found one. And I plan on using it.

Often.


http://www.vimeo.com/17614094